


looking glass

by thepensword



Series: de la lune [4]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, honestly idk what else to tag it's just me getting emotional about Lucretia again, introspective, this time with more angus cuz why not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 19:19:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15564693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepensword/pseuds/thepensword
Summary: Angus is polite and well-behaved and stifled and trapped and so, so familiar. Lucretia looks at him and sees herself and wishes she knew how to set him free the way her family once did for her.Or: the similarities between Angus and Lucretia





	looking glass

**Author's Note:**

> i'm not sure this story has a point besides me wanting to do something with the similarities of their backstories that i headcanoned for them

Angus McDonald is a wonderful boy.

He is bright. He is intelligent. He is kind and witty and a delight to talk to, and everyone at the Bureau falls almost instantly in love with him. Carey thinks he’s just about the greatest thing since knives. Killian wants to adopt him.

And the Director loves him, too, in the distant way that a boss should love her employee. But while the Director sees the brilliant detective, _Lucretia_ sees something else, loves something else.

Angus is bright. He is brilliant. He is polite and well-mannered. He says his pleases and his thank yous and he uses _ma’am_ and _sir_ as often as most people use _yes_ and _no._

And that’s the other thing. Angus seems almost afraid to tell them no.

“No thank you, Madame Director, I’m terribly terribly sorry,” he’ll say, and he will not look at her. “I really don’t mean to offend, I really am sorry.”

“No need to apologize, Angus,” says the Director as she puts away the offered bag of PGORP that the boy had just rejected. “It’s only some nuts.”

 _You’re allowed to say no,_ whisper Lucretia’s thoughts. And, deep down, _that was me, once_.

She wants to reach out to him, the way her family...the way the others once had done for her. She wishes she could help him.

She was a young girl, once, alone in a crumbling world. And perhaps that young girl could help him, but she is not Lucretia anymore. She is the Director, strong and cold, and so all she can do is smile and show him out of her office.

 

* * *

 

 

Some facts:

  1. Angus is bright. Angus is brilliant. Angus is quiet and polite and well-mannered.
  2. He is sometimes sarcastic. He is sometimes afraid.
  3. Angus flinches from things, almost imperceptibly.
  4. (Sometimes he does not sleep.)
  5. Once, the Director was a girl running from a world consumed.
  6. Once, Lucretia was a statue in the shadows of her own home.
  7. Once, she was quiet, and polite, and well-mannered.
  8. (Once, she and him would have seen reflections in the mirror of each other’s souls.)



 

* * *

 

 

“Angus,” says Lucretia. She’s found him alone, out in the grass square in the center of the commons, lying on his back under the sky.

It’s midnight. The world is cast silver beneath the stars.

“Angus,” is what she says on her late-night stroll. “Why are you awake?”

She feels guilty for how quickly he scrambles to his feet and rushes to brush the dry grass and clumps of dirt from his clothing. She wishes she knew how to tell him to be as dirty and disheveled and young as he can be.

“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am,” says Angus, and adjusts his glasses under his uncombed curls. “I was just...I was...um. Stargazing.”

Lucretia arches one eyebrow in a way that she hopes reads more amused and less disapproving, though with her age and rank she knows it often comes across as the latter. “Stargazing?”

She regrets it when she sees his shoulders straighten impossibly further. She wants to apologize but she knows it will not be appreciated, and as the Director, and not Lucretia, she knows it is far too soon to open the way into a subject so serious as the life he may have lead before coming here.

Before she brought him here. He’s safe now, whatever else happens—relics and the distantly looming threat of the Hunger aside—and Lucretia smiles to think that with everything she has done that has ripped her world apart, she is still managing to do good.

(It does little to assuage her guilt, but perhaps it helps shift it aside a bit. Just enough so she can breathe without screaming her frustrations to the empty and unforgiving sky, beyond which lie countless realities, many of which bear a history not erased by Lucretia’s own hand.)

“Angus,” says Lucretia again, and sits down on the grass, legs crossed beneath her and not bothering to care about grass stains on her immaculate blue-white-purple robes. She can always clean them, or get another pair—they hold no sentimental value. (They are not red. They do not look like memories.) “Sit with me?”

He watches her behind round-rim glasses and then does so, carefully lowering himself to the ground once again. “Madame Director—”

“Sometimes,” says Lucretia, “when I cannot sleep, I like to take walks outside to clear my head.” She gestures with a slender hand to the night around them and smiles her softest smile. “The base is beautiful at night, isn’t it?”

Angus is silent for a long moment. He is regarding her with the calculation of a detective and the mistrustful eye of a child raised in a house of glass.

“Yes,” says Angus. Then, reflexively, “Ma’am.”

Lucretia looks at the small, quiet boy that is Angus McDonald and sees herself. And, in that moment, she makes a decision.

“No,” she says, and smiles. “You can call me Lucretia.”

 

* * *

 

 

Angus is crying.

“Sirs?” he’s calling, into the Stone that crackles and pops (static, though thankfully not the kind that’s heavy with guilt) and gives no reply. And Lucretia wishes she could cry with him, but she can’t, because she’s old now, and she forfeited that right when she threw her family away.

“They’ll be alright, Angus,” says Lucretia, even though she’s not sure she believes it and worry sits hot and heavy beneath her breastbone like a stone plucked from the fire. “They’re strong, and smart. They’ll pull through. They always do.”

Angus pushes his glasses up his nose and rubs the tears from his eyes in a futile gesture. “The—the robot said they were cheating, it’s going to kill them, it’s cuz I—”

“Angus,” says Lucretia.

He looks up at her with glistening brown eyes and she is met with her own reflection. Fear and loss and guilt, the swirling, tumultuous rhythm of _it’s my fault, I can’t know that they’re okay and it’s my fault._

For just a moment, she thinks about hugging him, but then the static cuts out and what’s left of her family is alive and she didn’t kill them, and Angus didn’t either.

 

* * *

 

 

“Madame Director?” says Angus. “Or, uh, Miss Lucretia?”

Lucretia lifts her eyes from the empty page before her and sees Angus, standing in her doorway in the indigo shadows of the night. He looks so small, and so tired. This Candlenights has been hard on him.

“Angus,” says Lucretia, and hopes he does not notice the depth of the circles beneath her eyes. “Please, come sit.”

He does. The chair is too big for him, and his feet dangle in the air, the tips of his fine leather shoes just barely brushing the floor. He’s watching her from behind those circle-rim glasses and his gaze is full of questions.

“Can I ask you something?”

She nods. She does not say that there are some answers she cannot give. (She wishes, sometimes—often—that she could. But the weight of her guilt is far too heavy to share across anyone else’s shoulders.)

“You care about them a lot, don’t you?”

Oh.

Lucretia runs a hand down her face and sighs, and in that moment she feels all of her fifty years, one hundred and fifty years, thirty years. This past decade has aged her more than any of the century ever did, even ignoring the years she lost in Wonderland. Guilt is a powerful sickness.

“I do,” she says. “And you do too, I think.”

Angus shifts and looks away. He’s chewing on the inside of his lip in thought, and Lucretia watches herself bite the end of her pencil as she struggles to connect with a crew of strangers who are older and stronger and braver than herself. It’s not the same gesture, but it is similar enough as to be haunting. “I don’t understand it,” he says, finally. “They’re not nice, or kind, or gentle. They’re mean. I don’t—”

“You don’t know why,” says Lucretia, “but you love them. I know.”

His eyes are unreadable as they lock onto hers, and she can see his mind churn with the evidence of her words. She worries that she’s revealed too much, but he needs this. They both do.

“Who are they to you?” asks Angus.

(He has always been so, so clever.)

“They helped me once,” says Lucretia, words measured and careful, careful. She will not unveil the static, will not let him hear her guilt or her history. She can’t afford that. “Those ridiculous, brilliant, beautiful buffoons. They helped me, and I think they are helping you, too.”

Angus pauses. His swinging legs still. His posture is not so rigid as it once was, his tone not so cautious. He is freer and younger and happier now, and Lucretia thinks that they both know why.

“Yeah,” says Angus. He slides out of his chair and murmurs his goodnight, before pausing in the doorway and glancing back at her.

“Lucretia?”

“Yes?”

He fidgets for a moment and then sighs. “I hope someday you forgive yourself for whatever it is you’re blaming yourself for.”

Lucretia’s heart stalls but he’s already left.

 

* * *

 

 

Some happenings:

  1. The Hunger comes. It is massive. It is horrible.
  2. Lucretia’s plan is perfect. It is painful. It does not work.
  3. They win anyway. They win because they are a family and they will not go down easily.
  4. They are happy, and victorious. They are angry for the time they lost.
  5. Lucretia does not fit the picture.



 

* * *

 

 

“They don’t hate you,” says Angus.

Lucretia lies on the grass beneath the clear sky (blue, like robin’s eggs, and that will never stop being strange) and does not look at him. “Don’t they?" she says. Listless. Improper. Her mother would reprimand her for it, if she were not long gone.

“They don’t,” says Angus. He sits down beside her. “They’re angry, but they love you. Even Taako.”

Lucretia says nothing. The world spins around them. Birds call high above. The world, impossibly, still exists, and the massive threat of the Hunger is no more. They did it. They won. And Lucretia….

Lucretia lies in the grass beside a boy who is a reflection of the girl she once was and she wishes she knew how to be free and open like he has become.

“We’re a lot alike,” says Angus. He picks at the grass and plays with it in between his fingers, trying to tie it into a knot or a bow. It snaps under the treatment and he picks another piece. “I’m sure you realized that.”

“Mm.”

“They didn’t abandon us, even when they could have, even when it would have been easier. They didn’t abandon me. They stayed and they fought and they won, and it’s because of you that they were able to do that. If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead.”

Lucretia tears her eyes from the sky and looks at him. He’s sitting on the ground with bits of grass on his knees, and his curls blow loose and tangled in the breeze. He looks happier, now, than he ever did before. The steel has been removed from his spine, the glass from his veins.

“I’m glad I met them,” says Angus, and holds out his fist. She cautiously extends a hand beneath it and he drops a dandelion into her palm, bright and yellow and bursting with layer upon layer of petals. “And you.”

Lucretia tucks the flower behind her ear and pulls him into a hug.

Sometimes one can find forgiveness in the shape of their reflection.

  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! drop a comment or visit my [tumblr](https://thepensword.tumblr.com)


End file.
